So the Mrs. and I are starting up a new family blog to keep friends and family abreast of what’s going on with us, and particularly for keeping track of us as we gear up to head to China to adopt Peanut. Head to GoDaddy.com to get the domain name: Check. Head over to WebbleYou to sign up for hosting: Check. WebbleYou sends me to PayPal to set up the monthly payments: … er, not check. Here’s what I got when trying to send the payment in:

So evidently, I must have received an email asking me to click on a link to accept a new User Agreement. Almost certainly either I deleted it or my spam filter ate it, because 99% of emails that purportedly come from PayPal or eBay asking you to click on something or enter information are phishing schemes. Well, OK, so I missed a legitimate PayPal email. I’ll just look around for a place where I can enter in the information they want, since, you know, they said they want to restore my account as soon as possible.

Problem: There is nowhere on the frickin’ PayPal website where you can do this. One hour of my life, wasted trying to find the place to click on the “Yes, I agree totally with the above user agreement I mindlessly glossed over” button.

Look, PayPal people. I don’t mind if you restrict my account if I do something wrong. But if you’re going to do that, make it so that I can do the right thing easily, and quickly — or at least tell me where to go or what I need to do. You give me a message that says “please accept the new User Agreement”. Fine. I’d love to. But I can’t. There’s not even so much as an instruction of whom to email. So instead, you got an incoherent letter to tech support that might be replied to during this decade or maybe not — and you have a dissatisfied customer and a snippy blog posting to go along with it. How hard can it be to tell a person how to fix his own problem?

What PayPal needs is serious competition and a decent economic butt-kicking.